Is Malaysia fast becoming a rogue state in today’s international society?

The Information Ministry's Special Affairs Division (Jasa), which has been assigned the special task of exonerating the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak and the Malaysian government of any responsibility for the 1MDB kleptocratic scandal, made a startling statement when its director general, Datuk Mohd Puad Zakashi, said that the arbitration settlement between 1MDB and Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Corporation (IPIC) has “weakened” US Department of Justice (DOJ) civil suits and claims that the 1MDB funds were stolen.

Puad may not have realized it, but his statement was as good as a government admission that the US DOJ has a case to apply for the forfeiture of more than US$1 billion of 1MDB-linked assets, but the Malaysian government believes that the arbitration settlement has weakened the suits from the evidential aspects.

Whether this is so is open to dispute, but it is most startling, to say the least, that the Malaysian government, which has completely denied that there is a 1MDB scandal, both nationally and internationally, suddenly accepting the scenario that DOS had a case to apply for the forfeiture of over US$1 billion of 1MDB-linked assets – subject to the availability of adequate evidential material to prop up the kleptocratic suits.

If the Malaysian government’s stand is that there is no 1MDB scandal at all, that all the 1MDB allegations are the “fevered imaginations” of those with ill-intentions to the Najib government, including several foreign nations, then Puad and the Malaysian Government should be consistent in holding that there is simply no case whatsoever for the DOJ lawsuits – and not talking about the “weakening” of DOJ law suits as a result of the 1MDB-IPIC arbitration agreement!

The design to present the 1MDB-IPIC arbitration settlement as concrete proof that there is no 1MDB scandal in the first place, that it was all a plot by “vested interests” causing “foreign authorities…chasing their own tails” have been undermined not only by Fuad’s ambivalent position but by today’s news reports of Italy as the latest foreign country to join the international ranks of nations mounting a probe related to the 1MDB scandal.

It boggles the imagination that the institution of the largest US kleptocratic litigation to forfeit over US$1 billion of 1MDB-linked assets, the closure of two Swiss banks and the jailing of a number or private bankers related to the 1MDB scandal in Singapore, and the investigations by the prosecutorial and financial authorities in UK, Switzerland, Luxemburg, UAE, Hong Kong and Australia are all dismissed by the Malaysian authorities as “foreign authorities…chasing their own tails” in the international 1MDB money-laundering scandal.

Is Malaysia fast becoming a rogue state in today’s international society?